Unrequited
by LostInWonderland72
Summary: 'I asked her to come with me once. She said, 'Why' I said, 'I'll show you the world.' She laughed at me then, a broken chime of bitter bells, and said 'There is nothing you can show me. I have seen all that I care to see of this world.' A series of vignettes on post-crash Susan Pevensie through the eyes of a distant lover.
1. chilled by the ice in her eyes

**A/N: **I've had a bit of Susan-inspiration, and this is what came of it. There will be a couple of short vignettes, through the eyes of the last of her admirers.

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They don't love her the way they used to.

_Cold, bleak and barren, cold in the flesh, cold in the bone, cold in the eye, cold in the heart._

It isn't her fault.

Maybe it is. He lost his reasoning somewhere along the line.

He is the only one that keeps on worshipping her, as they all had, once. He is the only one who still calls on her, who still bothers with her, who still knows the name the rest of them have forgotten so quickly. _Susan Pevensie. _Society's glittering princess, its most dazzling jewel, smashed into a million razor sharp pieces. Shattered into nobody.

But he can't remember what it was like not to adore her. Every boy who knew her loved her a little, he thinks. When her reign as the social queen comes to an abrupt end, and another sits on her throne, he remains her faithful subject.

She is like some rich girl's china doll, a lovely, lifeless thing, a puppet brought to life for the entertainment of those who grasp her strings. Her clothes pretty and stylish, a face that could be made of porcelain, lips and eyes painted on to perfection by the most skilful of doll makers. She is blindingly beautiful, but as with all things, the moment a tiny crack appears, the merest fault in her, she is cast aside, a broken toy, ruined, no longer loved. In just such a way has her whirl of society cast her out. Oh, she is beautiful still, gorgeous in her melancholy, but something has snapped behind her eyes. She doesn't smile anymore. She doesn't drink, or flirt, or gossip. Her face is like a frozen wasteland. You could get lost in it, but it would chill you to the soul.

They had no sympathy. She was lost to grief, and nobody wanted a party with such an immense cloud of mourning hung over it, so they cast her out, and she was content to live in silence and dullness with nothing but her sorrow for company. She did not fight them, she did not try. She became another flapping winter coat hurrying along the blustery street, nameless and friendless.

Except for him.

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**A/N: **What do you think? It's a bit different from my normal style, and I'd be very grateful for some feedback. I hope you enjoyed it!


	2. and it's forgotten to stop raining

**A/N: **And here is the second chapter of Unrequited. Enjoy.

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_We were walking along the promenade in Blackpool, she and I, arm in arm. She does not look at me. Her face is turned out to the rushing sea, and the salted breeze tosses to perfume of her hair back into my face. Anyone would have thought that we were just another happy young couple. But she is somewhere else. _

He becomes her only friend, and stays only her friend.

They live in a kind of limbo. She cannot move forward, she cannot go back. And because she cannot, he will not. Their lives become like the rain in autumn-steady, monotonous, dismal and unchanging.

He has known people lose what is precious to them before, but none of them did it the way she did. She is no fountain of tears, she is no flood of memories. She does not walk past things or people or hear strains of music that cause her to turn to him with sorrowful, over-bright eyes and tell him that it reminds her of them. She does not surround herself with photographs of them to keep them in her mind, nor does she hide the traces of them to protect herself from the agony of remembrance. She does not forge herself a new life. She sits contentedly in the cooling ashes of her old one, and because he was always devoted to her, he sits with her. She does not welcome him; she does not turn him away. She does not grasp desperately at this human contact; she does not throw him out with anguished declarations of needing to be alone. She simply is, and he is with her.

And yet no one can deny that she is grieving. The colour has bled out of her life, and nothing on earth seems to give her joy.

He finds her tolerance of him strange. In the days before the crash, when she was glamorous and popular, she always had someone else to be with. She had sneered at him along with the rest of them. She had other men, ones with muscle and without glasses. He was allowed into their parties to provide them with amusement, but he had loved her just as all the other men did. He had written her a poem once, and she had laughed at him.

But when all that was over, and it seemed that popular, glamorous Susan Pevensie had also died on the day of the train crash, the fourth week after he had started calling on her, he found her sitting at the kitchen table, reading his poem. She had handed it back to him and told him sincerely, but without expression, that it was a good poem.

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**A/N: **Thanks for reading! Reviews are much appreciated.


	3. and the moon won't answer her questions

**A/N: **And so to the next chapter. I apologise for the wait. Enjoy!

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_There were wisps of smoke curling under her door next time I visited. She was sat on the table top in the kitchen, dropping lighted matches into a ragged heap of fine cloths, with an expression like a becalmed ocean. I'd thought she was insane._

He recognises the cloth. This was her skirt from this party, and that her dress from that function. He forgets which. They all blur together in swirls of bright colour and brighter laughter and the companionable smells of drink and old perfume, and now they lie in a crumpled heap of torn rags at her feet, and she is calmly burning them.

He stamps out the fire quickly, and forces down the notion that she wouldn't have cared if it had burnt her too. He has to catch himself from apologising. It could have spread. It could have killed her. She wouldn't have cared.

She talks less and less every day, and it is true today. He wanders around the house in the same vacant trance as she, and half-notices the bins full of her cosmetics, and the aromatic pool on the bathroom floor from the perfume bottle now in shards, and the shattered, fragmented mirrors with the occasional spot of blood on the sharp edges that give hideous, distorted reflections, and the little cuts on her white hands.

Scraps of expensive material flutter pathetically through the house as if driven by an unfelt breeze. There is an open pair of iron scissors tossed onto her bedroom floor, along with two pen knives that were never hers and a set of car keys. All of them have vividly coloured threads caught on them, and her wardrobe looks as if a wild animal has been shut in there. The mirror on her vanity is dashed across the floor in glimmering pieces. He picks them all up diligently and sweeps them into the bin on top of her lipstick and blush, because she often wanders barefoot nowadays and in her absent-mindedness could slice open her feet and stain her carpet crimson. She wouldn't care.

There is evidence of rage everywhere except in her.

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**A/N: **Hmm, I wonder who those pen knives could have belonged to... Thank you for reading, reviews are much appreciated.


	4. and maybe the sun's gone to hell

**A/N:** Enjoy.

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_I asked her to come with me once. She said, 'Why?' I said, 'I'll show you the world.' She laughed at me then, a broken chime of bitter bells, and said 'There is nothing you can show me. I have seen all that I care to see of this world.'_

He finds it uncomfortable. Anyone would. The wind scrapes against his face as he turns up his collar to guard against it, and against the crushing awkwardness of his situation. He should have known better than to follow her to her family's graves. She strolls along the grass, dropping little white bouquets on a row of graves-one, two, three, four, five, six-and then stops, with three long-stemmed roses of a deep, bruised crimson left pricking her fingers.

There is just the one headstone for her three siblings. He knows that they are who she is really here to see. She sits by it and leans her head against it as if it were a familiar and well-loved shoulder, laying the three roses at its foot, after brushing the petals to her lips and then on the cold stone, one over each name. She wanted them buried together. She insisted on it. It was the only thing she had argued about since they died. It chills his soul to see the space she requested at the bottom of the white stone, room for just one more name.

She talks to them, low and secret. It is easy to see that she has forgotten that he is there. It strikes him that here in this field of the dead, the unmoving headstone is more alive to her than he is.

It's strange, because she hated her family. And because she hated them, he hated them too. Her emotions projected onto him, her ever-present shadow, and he felt the flicker of distaste for them which soon sparked and grew into hatred. She loathed them, and so did he.

He'll always remember the dark brother, Edmund, because one evening he had said something to her, quiet and impassioned, as she left their house. She had suddenly smacked her open palm across his face, and then was instantly horrified at herself. Edmund watched her without anger, but woundedness and a sadness that was difficult to look at. He, standing with her friends on the street, had watched as an apology teetered on her tongue. A choice. She pulled it back. She was remorseless, tossing her hair and joining them for a night out. She had chosen her friends, and that was the last time he saw Edmund walk her to the door.

The youngest, the girl Lucy, never seemed quite right-but then, all three were odd. She had a tearful glare that she would turn on them when they whisked her sister off in their flash cars or returned her staggering drunk. She talked of stars and seahorses, not of dates and debutantes, and he knew other girls thought her strange. Once she had noticed him, tagging along at the back of their crowd, and smiled at him so openly that he had never looked her in the eye again.

He especially hated the eldest one, Peter, the one that frightened him. He would stand at the doorway and watch as she pranced off down the street, a man on each arm. He would say nothing, but the look he would give them-as though they had stolen something unspeakably precious from him-would always make him feel an unwilling rush of guilt, and wonder what right they had to break this golden man's heart.

He turns away from her, and leaves her to talk to the dead.

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**A/N: **This one turned out a bit longer than the rest... Thanks for reading! I reckon that if a song were to go with this fic, it would be Breathe No More by Evanescence. :)


	5. but the dawn is in her smile

**A/N: **Gosh, I haven't updated this for a while! Still, I'm back-and we're also beginning a new chapter in Susan's life. Thank you for your patience!

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_She smiles at me, and I almost stop breathing. She has never been more beautiful, not when she was popular, not ever. She smiles at me, and she is the most glorious thing I have ever laid eyes on, or ever will. She smiles at me, and if I die now, I will be a happy man. 'It's all right,' she says to me. I can't tell how long she has been sitting in this church. I didn't think to look for her here. I stand motionless in the nave, between the rows of old wooden pews, watching her. Her eyes are dry and clear. The sun is setting through the stained glass windows, and her face is a blaze of bright colours. 'It's all right,' she repeats serenely, 'they've just gone on ahead.' _

'_Who?' I rasp, dry-mouthed._

'_Them who I loved most dearly in all the world,' she says softly. 'They're waiting for me, all three of them. They just went on ahead a little way.'_

_Perhaps in another setting I might have thought she had finally snapped, but the weight in her words crushes my cynicism._

'_I couldn't see them for such a long time. I thought they had abandoned me. I thought that I deserved it. That it was my punishment.' Happiness such as I have never seen before burns in her face as she gives a little laugh, as if to shake off her own foolishness. 'My own blindness was the real punishment. They called me, and I didn't answer. I blocked my ears. But I'm listening now. I see them now. They're waiting for me to come home.' _

_She rises from her knees before the altar, and walks towards me like a triumphant angel, adorned luminously with all the colour of the stained glass windows and the golden rays of the decaying sunlight. She stops before me, so close I can see an otherworldly shimmer glinting in her eyes, and suddenly, sweetly, deliberately, she leans forwards and presses a kiss to my hollow cheek._

'_Thank you,' she breathes._

'_For what?' I manage._

'_Everything,' she whispers. 'But it's all right now. I'll see them in the morning.'_

_And she leaves, silhouetted in the doorway of the church for a moment like a goddess, like a saint, like a queen._

He puzzles all night over what she means by 'seeing them in the morning.'

When morning comes, he thinks that he has figured it out. He runs to her house, terrified of what he is sure will greet him-a rope in the rafters, a pool of cold blood, an empty pill box-but instead all there is is her, and a strangely cheerful 'good-morning,' and a fresh cup of tea for him, and an old crucifix resting on her white collarbone.

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**A/N: **While things have previously been very grim here, this is a story about redemption. I am a firm believer in the saying I first heard in a movie: 'It'll all be all right in the end. And if it's not all right, then it's not the end.' I find this quite appropriate for Susan's story. Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it! But I am not quite finished with Susan yet-there's more to come still.


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